>What is it about Peter Thiel that you feel would raise animosity?
The article makes sure to highlight that for anyone that might have missed it :) " It’s well-positioned to cash in on more government work thanks to Thiel’s relationship with President Donald Trump."
Edit: Mentioned, sure. In the article title when he's not central to the story? Click bait.
No, he's the chairman. Like John Thompson for MS and so on. Regardless, Thiel and Palantir are joined at the hip, so expect the one to be mentioned alongside the other without attributing it immediately to malicious intent.
There is something very much not right about a shareholder of a company like Palantir trying to sell their stake to a Chinese shareholder. That would give the Chinese fractional ownership of all the software and data that Palantir holds and processes, not much good could come of that.
I don't think we have the details to paint one side worse than the other.
Also don't see why a Chinese company can't buy shares in a company. Financial products, just like other products, are purchasable by any nationality.
If Palantir is doing something that risks national security then they ought to work with the government on that. I don't think we know enough about Palantir to make a judgement there.
> I don't think we have the details to paint one side worse than the other.
Are you kidding?
By any measure that is available China is a country that is inferior to a vast chunk of the world when it comes to civil liberties and political freedom.
Palantir or a substantial portion of it in the hands of the Chinese (and, by extension in the hands of the Chinese authorities, direct or indirect) is something that you simply should not want.
sounds like they would have been buying a minority holding through a TPG fund, and every investor doesn't have access to all the data and tech. so it depends...if a Chinese entity buys Boeing or Lockheed through an S&P fund it's not exactly a big deal
They're not buying these shares through a fund on the open market but in one large chunk from a direct shareholder.
Why assume they'd stop at a minority interest?
A Chinese equity buying a sizeable chunk of equity in Boeing or Lockheed would be a huge deal, comparable to the Aixtron acquisition (German chipmaker, deal got blocked by Obama administration on national security grounds). Ditto for Fairchild and Philips.
The Chinese directly or indirectly trying to gain a sizeable chunk of a company like Palantir is not just any old stock transaction, it is a strategic acquisition.
well, I wouldn't be OK with the Chinese owning an interest in Palantir that gave them insider access, fair enough, but the story is super light on details, including Abramowitz's role, why they fell out, why Jamie Dimon was going to get involved (must have felt they were out of line and there was an important issue involving important people).
If the China angle is an issue, then should it be an issue when Palantir gives immigration agents access to CIA files, ergo is involved in arbitrarily denying visas, ergo de facto building the 'Muslim registry'?
Highbridge isn't normally going to get Jamie Dimon involved in routine business disputes for relatively modest amounts of money. He's got to run around Davos, wrestle whales and whatnot. You get Jamie Dimon involved when you want to put someone or everyone associated with the deal in JP Morgan's global double secret probation penalty box. Seems like there is a missing piece of the puzzle.
> By any measure that is available China is a country that is inferior to a vast chunk of the world when it comes to civil liberties and political freedom.
Seriously? What does that have to do with investing in the stock market?
Palantir isn't the Manhattan Project. Plus, the US is on friendly terms with China. Most of our computer hardware is made there. I don't see how Chinese investing in Palantir somehow hurts our national security. No need to spread FUD or build walls in the stock market.
Your comments seem to be in line with Thiel and Trump, who fear other countries, so I can see where you're coming from, I just think it's 1950's style thinking and not reflective of 2017 reality.
> Palantir or a substantial portion of it in the hands of the Chinese (and, by extension in the hands of the Chinese authorities, direct or indirect) is something that you simply should not want.
I don't see why not. China is a live and let live sort of government. They're not trying to export their civil liberties or political system to other parts of the world. They mainly care about what economic inputs/outputs they share with other countries.
Also, why do we care if China have access to Palantir's technologies? I agree that if they have access to the data, that would be a bad thing in terms of national security. But their technology wouldn't be any threat to us.
China rarely interferes with the internal affairs of foreign governments.
I don't see why giving China technology it's not likely to use outside of its borders is an issue here. Like I said before, access to data is another thing all together.
> China rarely interferes with the internal affairs of foreign governments.
I've been paying pretty good attention to the news the last 3 decades or so and I'm going to have to disagree with you there. They're not as bad as some but they are definitely players.
> If Palantir is doing something that risks national security then they ought to work with the government on that.
On the other hand, if they are already working with the government on things that have an impact on, or are related to, national security, then it is perhaps prudent not to sell large portions of the firm to foreign buyers.
Since this isn't a public company, and many startups have rules over what is valid or invalid sale of their private stock, isn't Palantir able to say who can and cannot buy the stock?
I am not making any claim about why or why not, just that they are currently in a posistion where they can control these things, right? If they were public this seems like it would be a different issue...
Also, if the US govt were very concerned about this, I imagine they would step in and block it.
I trust the relevant agencies and courts to determine whether such a sale ought to proceed. No sense choosing a side based on a news article while we are far from the details.
> Since this isn't a public company, and many startups have rules over what is valid or invalid sale of their private stock, isn't Palantir able to say who can and cannot buy the stock?
Hmm I don't know if that's common. I think the company often has right of first refusal for founders, meaning the company can buy shares being sold, though not sure whether they can block sales outright.
> Also, if the US govt were very concerned about this, I imagine they would step in and block it.
Yeah, I agree. The security argument sounds like an investor's way of hyping the value of the company, since it's "so valuable China shouldn't be allowed to invest in it". Also could be Thiel's version of "I don't want to bake your gay wedding cake", substituting the Chinese for gays.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS, commonly pronounced "sifius") is an inter-agency committee of the United States Government that reviews the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies or operations. Chaired by the United States Secretary of the Treasury, CFIUS includes representatives from 16 U.S. departments and agencies, including the Defense, State and Commerce departments, as well as (most recently) the Department of Homeland Security
I'm more comfortable with the Chinese holding my data than some Western governments. The simple reason is that I do not live in China and they literally cannot do much with it.
You lack imagination. Blackmail, espionage, economic advantage are all possible if a you have the kind of data that Palantir is fairly routinely assumed to have access to.
Do I lack "imagination" because I'm less worried about "the Chinese" seeing "mah datah" than about USA LEOs seeing it? Very few Americans have suffered injustice at the hands of PRC. Meanwhile back in USA, 1% of adults are incarcerated and 2% are on parole.
Well, depending on who you are the threat might shift from the one to the other. But why make it easier on any of these groups? At least you get to vote in the US elections and if enough people do what's right you might be able to change something about those percentages.
Sure, they can just threaten to hand off your information to people who will, or will do worse. I'm not excusing the US, but be real, China keeps a file on each other citizens with a "loyalty" score. They're already doing what politicians here merely plan to do.
> I don't think one Chinese company is "the Chinese"...
There is no way an acquisition at this level is made from China without party approval. You can't more more than $50K out of China without a very specific permit.
> why do you have a blanket distrust of "the Chinese"?
Also, Delaware companies' shareholders automatically get inspection rights. That could allow a savvy shareholder to, by monitoring revenue changes, guess sensitive information.
Either way, the Board should have put some political/newspaper test language in their shareholder rights documents as it pertains to transfers.
I'm confused. Seems like they have been trying to sell shares directly to parties in order to use their preferred agreements in regards to financial disclosures and annual reports? Yet if they're looking into an IPO they would be obliged to do that exact thing right?
And you lack knowledge about about own county, which has degraded from one of the most liberal states in Europe into a police state in less than a decade.
It's not like it is a secret, besides, it backfired because I'm fairly even-handed when it comes to privacy, no country gets a free pass on violations.
Interesting that "You lack imagination" is apparently not uncivil. FYI, that is the phrase that started the derailment of this thread.
But certain people get away with doing these things on a regular basis for more than 10 years, even though they don't write particularly interesting comments.
If you want to point them out to us, I'd be interested in taking a look: hn@ycombinator.com. But other people breaking the rules doesn't justify your doing so.
This is problematic. Who gets to say it's worth billions? Private appraisals are notoriously inaccurate and can be easily biased.
Who should they disclose this information to? Shareholders can negotiate this right when they make their investment, just as founders can. Why should someone who isn't an owner have access to private information about someone elses business?
Lets say you and a friend develop an innovative new startup (let's call it "Instawham"). Some friends join you and very quickly you become successful enough to have a bunch of customers and strong VC funding, but you are still a small company with a few dozen employees. You are a forward thinking CEO so you share information about the business with all of your employees, but caution them it's all proprietary and that sharing with competitors could hurt the business, so you are confident they won't share.
A big company, say Facebook, offers to buy you for a few billion dollars. But besides not wanting to work for Zuckerberg, you think they are just trying to get access to your financials and business plans to compete with you and will pull the offer as soon as you disclose. So you say no.
Now TechCrunch approaches you, and reminds you that by the newly passed "saycheese law" any multibillion dollar valued startup must release it's financials, shareholder lists, risk assessments, etc. They demand all of that information so they can publish it and sue you when you decline. Your lawyer tells you because of "saycheese law" you will lose, so you turn it over and Facebook launches their competitor soon after the TechCrunch article.
You are the one prolonging this thread by making the preposterous assertion that a PR company would be stupid enough to create a numerical account for astroturfing.
Proper astroturfing is done with "respected" accounts and is far more subtle.
I agree with what you're saying, however the fact that those were throwaway accounts and the pattern of their answers (not only to me) weigh heavily towards some kind of coordinated commenting.
I see there are official ways of reporting suspected shilling, at a time where astroturfing is having an important impact on the real world it's important that the administration keep these in check in this space.
You can always construct this kind of argument, and they almost always turn out to be wrong when investigated, but in the meantime have toxic side effects. That's why we have to be strict about this.
Most of us are orders of magnitude too quick to interpret our own cognitive bias as abuse by others (e.g. X seems obvious to me so anyone arguing ~X must be a shill). This places the threshold for useless, nasty arguments ('you're a shill. no, you're the shill') dangerously low. Combine that with the evil catnip power of meta and you get a strain of offtopicness that's especially malignant.
So... Should Google be reporting the addresses of people who search for drugs? Should Facebook be informing the TSA about people's religion? Do you really want corporations spying on you for the government even more than they currently do?
I tacitly acknowledged that in my post with "even more". There is a substantial, I would say extreme, difference between submitting to a court order and proactively providing data to the government.
> Should Google be reporting the addresses of people who search for drugs? Should Facebook be informing the TSA about people's religion?
This is a false equivalence, as searching for drugs is not actually illegal, nor is believing in a certain faith.
A better analogy would be "Should Google be reporting the addresses of people who are distributing child pornography? Should Facebook be informing the TSA of people who are planning to bomb a plane?" In both cases, the answers is yes, and they are almost legally obligated to if they have clear evidence of wrong-doing.
Yea the reality is should Google report the addresses of people googling for "sexy teens"? Should Facebook inform the TSA of people who watch plane explosion videos? Whatif their profiles indicate they are Muslims?
Very very rarely does someone type into their browser that they want to rape a child, or share on Facebook their plans to bomb a plane. Instead the authorities make inferences, inferences that often lead to the harassment, even prosecution, of innocent people.
I guess you missed the main point, which is "false equivalence". The two examples you're using have absolutely no bearing on this case.
This is a technology licensing case. Would you be angry at Google for licensing its search technology to help run background checks on childcare providers? Would you care if Facebook licensed its social graph technology to see if you should be eligible for a drivers' license based on your medical history?
I don't think you understand "false equivalence". You responded to someone concerned about corporations turning people into the government because of things in their private web histories.
Your response was they should, if those people were clearly committing crimes.
My response was, it's very rarely clear whether some is committing a crime or not from their web history, and that companies can be easily coerced into sharing information that is just indicative of a possible crime, which can lead to innocent people being harassed or charged.
Specifically thousands of crimes a day (if not more) are committed by Facebook users, and some of those users leave traces of those crimes on Facebook. Facebook is heavily incented to help turn in those criminals to show they are good corporate citizens, and to head off extensive regulation and even civil penalties that could be created by grand standing lawmakers. Facebook has little to no incentive to protect my rights.
Now my kid posts "I love weed" on their FB profile, and it's caught the massive dragnet of data being turned over to authorities every day from Facebook. Police get a warrant, bust down my door, and arrest my child if they find weed in their room. If my kid had a couple ounces of pot and the cops think I'm a jerk, they may seize my home.
If they don't find weed but find painkillers in my wife's purse not accompanied by her legal prescription for them, they will arrest her to justify the raid.
Or a dozen other bad things could happen, like they could shoot my barking 60 lb dog (who has never bitten anyone in her life), or worse.
So no, I don't want web service providers who have access to my personal information sharing that information with law enforcement. The police can do real police work to catch real criminals, most of their time they seem to abuse the constitution to arrest people for victimless crimes, I don't think they need more tools for that.
Thanks for proving the example false equivalence. Palantir is not a service provider to you, it is a data analysis company.
If Google or Facebook performed data mining on data it owned, that'd be one thing. Palantir is providing tools that analyze publicly available information.
> Or a dozen other bad things could happen
Yes, that's life. At any point any bad things can happen that's out of your control.
If somebody in your family posted "I love weed" on a public billboard, you might expect increased police attention.
Extrapolating a dead dog and painkiller arrests (both vanishingly rare events) are hysterical statements not based in fact.
No knock warrants are not "vanishing rare events" and having nervous cops point weapons at you is not pleasant. And people get arrested for prescription drug abuse all the time, and plocue have the "discretion" to arrest you if you are carrying certain drugs without your prescriptions on you (don't worry if you work in the DAs office, warning only).
So you might not be concerned about getting trapped in the maw of our now enormous law enforcement machine, but plenty of people are given virtually every adult in the US has committed a felony at one point or another because of one crazy law or another. Not only do I not want Google or Facebook using automated algorithms to pit me in the maw, I don't want them sharing that data with Palantir so it can do it either. That gives for Chase Bank, Verizon, etc.
Most law enforcement actions are predicated on circumstantial evidence.
We already provide such information, which is completely legal.
For instance, if there's a pipe bomb, police track down the list of people who've bought ingredients from the bomb (from retailers, cell phone companies) and other sources of information to narrow down the list of probable suspects.
The Boston bombers were caught by such techniques. I don't see why this is any different.
It's different because this isn't the government doing it. It is corporate vigilantism at best, which means there is no oversight and no privacy.
Regardless, your reframing is not convincing. Portraying immigrants as "criminals" isn't gonna make people want to deport them any more than saying drug users are inherently criminals. The reality of the law is way less important than its actual morality, which people have made up their minds about already.
Palantir is a company selling data analysis software. They're doing what they're paid to do. How is this corporate vigilantism?
> The reality of the law is way less important than its actual morality
That is absolutely untrue. There are ways to change the law. People fail to understand that when you break the law to protest it, you still have to face the consequences.
This latest federal judge injunction against the travel bad is a horrible thing for our system, no matter what you think of the ban.
The president is well within his purview to establish regulations and restrictions for foreign travel. For an activist judge to make a decision like this, gives ample reason for his removal and/or sanction. Once you have the judicial branch trying to enact policy or morality, you have the ability for the executive branch to remove all dissent.
The immigration act makes it explicitly illegal to discriminate based on religion. That act is instructions to the president from Congress. The president is banning travel from those countries for their religion. The president absolutely does not have the power over foreign travel you say he does, that belongs solely to Congress. You're delusional.
I agree with both points. Police officers do not and should not have the authority to enforce the law, and anything that stops people from going to the United Sates is wrong. So clearly companies are violating our privacy when hired by law enforcement to examine public records in order to catch them and send them back to their own country. I admire your courage in standing up for all Americans, especially the 7.2 Billion Americans (7.5 Billion - 300 million) who happen to just not have citizenship yet.
If you resist going public for over a decade despite doing billions in revenue you are going to have investors who are upset about their inability to cash out.
It's almost like the company is allergic to receiving external market validation of its claimed valuation. They're happy to hold internal company "liquidation events" where employees can sell to employees, and take on massive yearly fund raising events to hush hush funds, but they never seem to want to let on in any public way what they're actually worth on the real market.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadIt's just a statement of fact.
>What is it about Peter Thiel that you feel would raise animosity?
The article makes sure to highlight that for anyone that might have missed it :) " It’s well-positioned to cash in on more government work thanks to Thiel’s relationship with President Donald Trump."
Edit: Mentioned, sure. In the article title when he's not central to the story? Click bait.
Also don't see why a Chinese company can't buy shares in a company. Financial products, just like other products, are purchasable by any nationality.
If Palantir is doing something that risks national security then they ought to work with the government on that. I don't think we know enough about Palantir to make a judgement there.
Are you kidding?
By any measure that is available China is a country that is inferior to a vast chunk of the world when it comes to civil liberties and political freedom.
Palantir or a substantial portion of it in the hands of the Chinese (and, by extension in the hands of the Chinese authorities, direct or indirect) is something that you simply should not want.
Why assume they'd stop at a minority interest?
A Chinese equity buying a sizeable chunk of equity in Boeing or Lockheed would be a huge deal, comparable to the Aixtron acquisition (German chipmaker, deal got blocked by Obama administration on national security grounds). Ditto for Fairchild and Philips.
The Chinese directly or indirectly trying to gain a sizeable chunk of a company like Palantir is not just any old stock transaction, it is a strategic acquisition.
If the China angle is an issue, then should it be an issue when Palantir gives immigration agents access to CIA files, ergo is involved in arbitrarily denying visas, ergo de facto building the 'Muslim registry'?
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/17/palantir-enables-immigra...
http://www.voanews.com/a/african-trade-conference-canceled-a...
Seriously? What does that have to do with investing in the stock market?
Palantir isn't the Manhattan Project. Plus, the US is on friendly terms with China. Most of our computer hardware is made there. I don't see how Chinese investing in Palantir somehow hurts our national security. No need to spread FUD or build walls in the stock market.
Your comments seem to be in line with Thiel and Trump, who fear other countries, so I can see where you're coming from, I just think it's 1950's style thinking and not reflective of 2017 reality.
It isn't Coca Cola either.
I don't see why not. China is a live and let live sort of government. They're not trying to export their civil liberties or political system to other parts of the world. They mainly care about what economic inputs/outputs they share with other countries.
Also, why do we care if China have access to Palantir's technologies? I agree that if they have access to the data, that would be a bad thing in terms of national security. But their technology wouldn't be any threat to us.
Tibetans might disagree with you.
China rarely interferes with the internal affairs of foreign governments.
I don't see why giving China technology it's not likely to use outside of its borders is an issue here. Like I said before, access to data is another thing all together.
I've been paying pretty good attention to the news the last 3 decades or so and I'm going to have to disagree with you there. They're not as bad as some but they are definitely players.
On the other hand, if they are already working with the government on things that have an impact on, or are related to, national security, then it is perhaps prudent not to sell large portions of the firm to foreign buyers.
I am not making any claim about why or why not, just that they are currently in a posistion where they can control these things, right? If they were public this seems like it would be a different issue...
Also, if the US govt were very concerned about this, I imagine they would step in and block it.
Hmm I don't know if that's common. I think the company often has right of first refusal for founders, meaning the company can buy shares being sold, though not sure whether they can block sales outright.
> Also, if the US govt were very concerned about this, I imagine they would step in and block it.
Yeah, I agree. The security argument sounds like an investor's way of hyping the value of the company, since it's "so valuable China shouldn't be allowed to invest in it". Also could be Thiel's version of "I don't want to bake your gay wedding cake", substituting the Chinese for gays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Investmen...
There is already an established consensus that foreign nations can't invest just like 'everyone else'.
I doubt that China is on the brink of holding a majority of Palantir, or that they would gain access to its data by investing.
You lack imagination. Blackmail, espionage, economic advantage are all possible if a you have the kind of data that Palantir is fairly routinely assumed to have access to.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveal...
If you feel that in light of that the Chinese having access to such information is a no-op then I have no further counter arguments.
What you're saying is wildly short-sighted, and frankly bound in a very dangerous false dichotomy.
There is no way an acquisition at this level is made from China without party approval. You can't more more than $50K out of China without a very specific permit.
> why do you have a blanket distrust of "the Chinese"?
When did you stop beating your wife?
Either way, the Board should have put some political/newspaper test language in their shareholder rights documents as it pertains to transfers.
I even wrote about that:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/wholesale-privacy-violations-in-...
But why even bother arguing with an account that was created just to field a personal attack.
> Supports China getting your data
Seems like a non-neutral party to me
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13901270 and marked it off-topic.
But certain people get away with doing these things on a regular basis for more than 10 years, even though they don't write particularly interesting comments.
Who should they disclose this information to? Shareholders can negotiate this right when they make their investment, just as founders can. Why should someone who isn't an owner have access to private information about someone elses business?
Lets say you and a friend develop an innovative new startup (let's call it "Instawham"). Some friends join you and very quickly you become successful enough to have a bunch of customers and strong VC funding, but you are still a small company with a few dozen employees. You are a forward thinking CEO so you share information about the business with all of your employees, but caution them it's all proprietary and that sharing with competitors could hurt the business, so you are confident they won't share.
A big company, say Facebook, offers to buy you for a few billion dollars. But besides not wanting to work for Zuckerberg, you think they are just trying to get access to your financials and business plans to compete with you and will pull the offer as soon as you disclose. So you say no.
Now TechCrunch approaches you, and reminds you that by the newly passed "saycheese law" any multibillion dollar valued startup must release it's financials, shareholder lists, risk assessments, etc. They demand all of that information so they can publish it and sue you when you decline. Your lawyer tells you because of "saycheese law" you will lose, so you turn it over and Facebook launches their competitor soon after the TechCrunch article.
Or maybe just a throwaway created by a part interested in the transaction
PR companies working weekends are expensive
Proper astroturfing is done with "respected" accounts and is far more subtle.
BTW, the '.' key on your keyboard is broken.
And your manual mention the use of petty mistakes to deflect attention. It is typical after all.
Respected accounts are important but maybe they're harder to come on HN? And then use throwaways for mudding the discussion
Maybe the admins could start tracking the IPs of those accounts and tracing them back to the originating organization.
Another commenter holding different views from you, or even posting a bad comment and being wrong, is not evidence of astroturfing or shillage.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13901243 and marked it off-topic.
I see there are official ways of reporting suspected shilling, at a time where astroturfing is having an important impact on the real world it's important that the administration keep these in check in this space.
Most of us are orders of magnitude too quick to interpret our own cognitive bias as abuse by others (e.g. X seems obvious to me so anyone arguing ~X must be a shill). This places the threshold for useless, nasty arguments ('you're a shill. no, you're the shill') dangerously low. Combine that with the evil catnip power of meta and you get a strain of offtopicness that's especially malignant.
http://www.ibtimes.com/trump-adviser-peter-thiels-palantir-t...
Trump Adviser Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies To Aid ICE In Immigration Raids Using Surveillance And Data Analysis
Trump Adviser Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies To Aid ICE in enforcing Country's Immigration Statutes Using Data Analysis & Available Metadata
Corporations already provide user data when provided a valid court order to do so, they have been doing it for decades.
This is a false equivalence, as searching for drugs is not actually illegal, nor is believing in a certain faith.
A better analogy would be "Should Google be reporting the addresses of people who are distributing child pornography? Should Facebook be informing the TSA of people who are planning to bomb a plane?" In both cases, the answers is yes, and they are almost legally obligated to if they have clear evidence of wrong-doing.
Very very rarely does someone type into their browser that they want to rape a child, or share on Facebook their plans to bomb a plane. Instead the authorities make inferences, inferences that often lead to the harassment, even prosecution, of innocent people.
This is a technology licensing case. Would you be angry at Google for licensing its search technology to help run background checks on childcare providers? Would you care if Facebook licensed its social graph technology to see if you should be eligible for a drivers' license based on your medical history?
Your response was they should, if those people were clearly committing crimes.
My response was, it's very rarely clear whether some is committing a crime or not from their web history, and that companies can be easily coerced into sharing information that is just indicative of a possible crime, which can lead to innocent people being harassed or charged.
Specifically thousands of crimes a day (if not more) are committed by Facebook users, and some of those users leave traces of those crimes on Facebook. Facebook is heavily incented to help turn in those criminals to show they are good corporate citizens, and to head off extensive regulation and even civil penalties that could be created by grand standing lawmakers. Facebook has little to no incentive to protect my rights.
Now my kid posts "I love weed" on their FB profile, and it's caught the massive dragnet of data being turned over to authorities every day from Facebook. Police get a warrant, bust down my door, and arrest my child if they find weed in their room. If my kid had a couple ounces of pot and the cops think I'm a jerk, they may seize my home.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-hous...
If they don't find weed but find painkillers in my wife's purse not accompanied by her legal prescription for them, they will arrest her to justify the raid.
Or a dozen other bad things could happen, like they could shoot my barking 60 lb dog (who has never bitten anyone in her life), or worse.
So no, I don't want web service providers who have access to my personal information sharing that information with law enforcement. The police can do real police work to catch real criminals, most of their time they seem to abuse the constitution to arrest people for victimless crimes, I don't think they need more tools for that.
Thanks for proving the example false equivalence. Palantir is not a service provider to you, it is a data analysis company.
If Google or Facebook performed data mining on data it owned, that'd be one thing. Palantir is providing tools that analyze publicly available information.
> Or a dozen other bad things could happen
Yes, that's life. At any point any bad things can happen that's out of your control.
If somebody in your family posted "I love weed" on a public billboard, you might expect increased police attention.
Extrapolating a dead dog and painkiller arrests (both vanishingly rare events) are hysterical statements not based in fact.
So you might not be concerned about getting trapped in the maw of our now enormous law enforcement machine, but plenty of people are given virtually every adult in the US has committed a felony at one point or another because of one crazy law or another. Not only do I not want Google or Facebook using automated algorithms to pit me in the maw, I don't want them sharing that data with Palantir so it can do it either. That gives for Chase Bank, Verizon, etc.
We already provide such information, which is completely legal.
For instance, if there's a pipe bomb, police track down the list of people who've bought ingredients from the bomb (from retailers, cell phone companies) and other sources of information to narrow down the list of probable suspects.
The Boston bombers were caught by such techniques. I don't see why this is any different.
Regardless, your reframing is not convincing. Portraying immigrants as "criminals" isn't gonna make people want to deport them any more than saying drug users are inherently criminals. The reality of the law is way less important than its actual morality, which people have made up their minds about already.
Palantir is a company selling data analysis software. They're doing what they're paid to do. How is this corporate vigilantism?
> The reality of the law is way less important than its actual morality
That is absolutely untrue. There are ways to change the law. People fail to understand that when you break the law to protest it, you still have to face the consequences.
This latest federal judge injunction against the travel bad is a horrible thing for our system, no matter what you think of the ban.
The president is well within his purview to establish regulations and restrictions for foreign travel. For an activist judge to make a decision like this, gives ample reason for his removal and/or sanction. Once you have the judicial branch trying to enact policy or morality, you have the ability for the executive branch to remove all dissent.
And there is something very wrong with US immigration policies.
Yes, they haven't been enforced.